"Please sit down!" I raised my voice, using my most authoritative "teacher" volume without frightening the rest of the kids seated in front of me. One of my 12-year-olds had gotten up from his desk, refusing to read aloud the paragraph we were dissecting from Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.
"Where are you going?" I demanded, heading down the aisle toward him. Fortunately, he didn't have anything metallic pointed at me.
"Toby, please sit down so we can go on!" By this time, Toby had one of his legs dangling out the awning window cranked open in the sweltering heat of Warner Robins, Georgia. I headed for the phone on the wall.
"Please send the Vice Principal to my room immediately! One of my students is climbing out the window."
By the time I finished the second sentence, Toby had managed to flatten his body plank-link through the pane of glass that extended outward and had disengaged himself from our study of Ernest. I heard a thud and crack of branches in the lantana, planted just six feet below and ran to the windows. The orange, yellow, and purple blossoms lay crushed amid the splintered branches on the ground. The back of Toby's blue-jean jacket and pants were visible, running through the parking lot toward the street in front of the school.
The Vice Principal threw open the door to my classroom. "Toby Mulcahy climbed through the window and is heading across the parking lot!" I shouted.
The back of his jacket was the last I ever saw of Toby Mulcahy.
Later that year, my students gathered around a black-and-white television projecting downward from the ceiling. Together we watched coverage of the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April, 1968, and in June that year, the assasination of Bobby Kennedy. My student reactions were mixed.
